imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
— white smoke gamer pope (@Theophite) August 16, 2018
I think of this succinct explanation of shitcoin every time I go to the vet, and all the late model Jeeps, Raptors, and MB SUVs are just sitting there idling with the windows rolled up for the 90 minutes that they are waiting on their dog to come back. It’s LA, and it’s 68 F outside, and really comfortable to sit there and read a book, or shitpost on social media, if that’s your thing, with your windows rolled down. Or would be, if not for all the loud-ass cars [1] idling away, producing nothing but more carbon to end the future earlier.
It’s probably still less than the equivalent shitcoin mining, or NFT generation, or ML model-building. But it produces nothing. At least shitcoin you could trade for darknet drugs.
[1] Since when did all the cars have to have F1 level exhaust noise? The euro cars have switches for that shit. America said fuck that, we’ll just annoy all our neighbors all the time. The Harley straight pipe asshole model writ large on every fucking Dodge, Chevy, and Ford, rolling coal on our ears and our sleep. And your fucking lights are too bright. Keeping your brights on all the time is the visual equivalent of the super-loud exhausts. Also, turn off your fucking fog lights. They’re still super bright! It’s not foggy! [2]
[2] The other half of this of course are the idiots who don’t turn on their lights on drizzly May Gray/June Gloom mornings. You’re driving a gray car, because they all are these days, on gray pavement, in a gray drizzle, at twilight. I know they’re stuck on bright, but turn your fucking headlights on.
Every time I listen to Radiolab, or The Hidden Brain, it actively makes me stupider. Not just with what’s got to be the hosts willful pretend [1] stupidity in order to get the presenter to explain it to them, but the whooshing sound as the point is missed over and over again.
[1] Dogs, I hope it’s pretend. Surely they haven’t done and hosted an hour-long show for years, and never read about the subject they are discussing. Is there no way to do this in which you don’t have to 1) be ignorant, or 2) pretend to be ignorant?
Is it too old-man-yelling-at-clouds to point out that just obvious stupid errors completely pull me out of the movie you are trying to get me to watch? Maybe Netflix doesn’t care, because it happens 15 minutes in, so it’s already counted as a view for their made-up numbers. To wit:
“Outside the Wire”: “How many hours do you have piloting the drone?” “Sir, Fifty-seven thousand, sir!”
Come on. Chuck Yeager had 14,000 over a whole career. This dude is no older than 30. From my extensive study of the Fighter Pilot Podcast, it’s rare for pilots to get over 2000 in a career. Or just do the fucking math. A work year is 2000 hours. So that’s over 28 years if you flew every hour you were at work and there was no pre-flight briefings, or after-action reports. It’s the military, so that seems unlikely, but say you could do 4000 hours without being so tired that you didn’t fly your (inflation-adjusted) $135M MQ-9 Reaper into the ground. That’s still a solid 14 years. And if you keep the same job in the military for 14 years, you’re probably not very good at it (you didn’t get promoted), and you’re older than 30.
“The Vast of Night”: WOTW (“War of the Worlds”, cute, get it!? GETIT?!). I know I’m an old, and the kids don’t listen to the radio anymore, but with few exceptions, W stations are east of the Mississippi. There are no W stations in New Mexico.
“The Old Guard”: Your thousand year old warriors go into an enclosed space not just willingly, but eagerly, and there’s no overwatch [1] to keep them from getting ambushed from behind? You’re worried about cameras, making a huge plot point of deleting a photo on a cell phone five minutes in, but you don’t wear black face-hiding balaclavas in action, like every cop in existence for the last decade? You walk right up to a camera and stare into it just to make sure they got a good look? The guys who just shot you weren’t warned that you were immortal and self-healing, and just stand around high-fiving instead of flex-cuffing you? I have no tactical training, but all those things make my skin crawl.
“Heist“: This is one of my favorite movies, but it’s a great example of the cardinal sin of big heists. Millions of dollars of gold is really fucking heavy, as is millions of dollars of cash [2]. They make a big deal about getting the weight right sometimes, like when they are loading it into the van, and melting it down, but not right when they are wheeling around stove-sized containers full of it like it was nothing, and trying to convince someone that it’s hidden on a boat, or driving off with it in an old Ford. The boat would sink. The Ford would have its headlights pointing straight up. Also that customs/freight-forwarder stuff is complete bullshit, especially for an international flight.
Airplane movie reviews:
Outside the Wire: Couldn’t finish it.
The Vast of Night: Fast forwarded through a lot of the moving camera work, exposition, and Sorkin-talking over each other (people didn’t do that in the Southwest in the late 50s and early 60s). The only person who dressed like Buddy Holly was Buddy Holly, and there was only one of those. Everyone else did not wear cool clothes. Still not good.
The Old Guard: Good bits interspersed with dumbness and cartoonish villainy.
Heist: One of my favorite movies ever, and the best roles by Hackman, Lindo, and de Vito.
“Everybody needs money, that’s why they call it money!”
“You want to hear my last words?” “I just did.”
[1] See also Outside The Wire above.
[2] “Heat” gets this right, mostly.
If the bike radar is out of juice, I don’t go until it’s recharged. That’s almost true of the HUD.
And I’m going to cry when that dies, because they don’t make it anymore, and the alternatives are 1) expensive 2) proprietary and 3) made by small companies likely to go out of business. Like I’m going to drop $1k on prescription lenses for a proprietary solution for which I won’t be able to get replacement batteries after a year.
It turns out that bike clothing is another buy once, cry once item. Generic $50 bike store and manufacturer jerseys and chamois suck. Mid-level ($100 on sale) are somewhat better. But the $200 on sale stuff is the shit. Zippers that work with one hand. Padding that doesn’t roll up and cause sores. Pockets that you can reach without twisting your arm off. Actually cool and not horribly sweaty and sticky (looking at you, Famous University Bike Club G. Hincapie brand). I should have just gotten Assos in the first place, and I wouldn’t have all the other crap in the drawer that I don’t want to wear.
Same with bikes, same with cameras, etc.
I started the madness about a year behind on my NYer subscription, stacked up on my nightstand. Home for every shit, I’m catching up now.
It’s a relief, in some sense, to be that far behind, pre-whatever-this-is. I don’t have to read a 20,000 word piece on Pete Buttagieg (whatever). Saved myself that brainspace. If you’re a year behind, you know that he didn’t win and you can look at the cartoons and move on. I’d rather read a “50,000 word piece on zinc”.
Everything else in the mag is just as relevant as it was.
It’s even easier now. I know everything they’re wrong about. I wonder which things I read in the current in the current issue are completely wrong. I read less of the daily NYer because of that.
Now I read the restaraunt reviews (why no more bar reviews – what happened there?), and know there will be no trip to NYC in the foreseeable future to try any of them, and they’ll all have closed anyway.
The most enduring sensation is “these people have no idea what’s coming”. I feel regret for the writers, and who they were then. So much effort expended on things that don’t matter.
“These people” are of course me a year ago.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
–Attributed to Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac (9 September 1585 – 4 December 1642)
Don’t write anything you can phone. Don’t phone anything you can talk. Don’t talk anything you can whisper. Don’t whisper anything you can smile. Don’t smile anything you can nod. Don’t nod anything you can wink.
–Attributed to Earl Long
Tagged QotD
Vulture cap
Reagan said that the scariest words in the English language were “I’m here from the government, and I’m here to help”, but I have to figure that “Your employer just got bought by Bain Capital” are scarier, and a lot more immediate.
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